Visual Effects Evaluation

Visual Effects Evaluation

In this report, I am going to evaluate my Visual effects project, starting from planning all the way to screening it to an audience. I will talk about the processes I had taken and the problems I occurred and posted onto my blogs.

To begin my project, I had to come up with a storyline for my piece of work. I had to think mostly about staging, lighting and camera shots. I had begun thinking of some ideas that I noted down in a blog post, either they were over ambitious or they weren’t going to be strong. I realise that coming up with a story using Visual Effects was trickier than anticipated as it isn’t just simply jotting down on paper what I wanted to portray, like in my other animations, but more of that fact that I had to create these incredible effects later. I had decided on a story development that I also explained in a blog post, which was to make a hologram appear above my PlayStation Vita. I had struggled with creating shots as when recording the footage; I had too many blurred shots because the aperture was set to wide to take in a large amount of light, making it so that it would track easier. The reason why my shots were blurred to begin with was because I had little light source I could use. Fortunately, I explained in another blog post that I passed this hurdle by borrowing a studio light from my College, which helped immensely as I managed to successfully take a video of my Vita on my desk. This was the key to figuring out where to place my light source for my Vita. I had placed the light in the middle of my room, shining on the Vita placed on the desk from near the roof. After managing to track this footage in MatchMover, I selected one track point to use on my Vita and exported it to Maya, in which I then placed objects in the space. I had looked on my 3D plane in MatchMover to determine which point was the best. I had found one very useful track point to use, which was the top right corner of the Vita as it stayed in the shot for the duration of the video footage. This was going to help me create my holograms above the console.
This was quite tricky because I had placed a plane mimicking the Vita’s screen which did not match up to the screen. Animating the whole plane to stay in place made it ninety percent accurate, but it needed to be as close to one hundred percent accurate. This lead me to then animate each vertex on the plane in conjunction with the screen. I had overcome another problem by doing this; when placing more objects in (like the hologram), it wouldn’t sit right with the track point. I had help figuring this part out by creating a null object and a null group, put the hologram inside and snapped the point to the top right corner of the screen. Next came the task of rendering out my animation with passes such as speculars, diffuses, mattes, and reflections. This was a very long process as the render passes had to render out each frame with each pass corresponding to multiple objects, but the goal was to make these look believable. The process took as long as thirteen hours.
Once I had my render passes, I could then begin to composite the footage. Importantly, my main goal was to create a glow effect of the holograms. It was tricky to do this as I had little experience in Autodesk Composite; figuring out what channels to use for my composition. I had received a lot of help on this and then tried making things differently, like adding in other effects to render passes to see if it would make it better or worse.
Once I was happy with the end result, I rendered my output to a .mov file. Thankfully, this rendering took considerably less time than the render passes. Once it was done, I then placed the footage in Premiere along with everything else to do with the story; like other recorded footage, small animations and soundtrack like voices and a song.
I had a group of animators review my work to get their feedback. The questionnaire focused mostly on the Visual Effects, asking questions about the hologram if it looked good or not. 

In this whole project, I have learnt a lot about the Visual Effects world. As enlightening and exciting VFX is today, I had however found the process very painstaking due to the amount of problems I had occurred while making a simple VFX of holograms, floating above an object. However, at the end of the production of it, I found that people liked what I made altogether as I didn’t make a piece of animation only a certain group of people would like. Nonetheless, it has given me an insight on how to create visual effects in animation and why a lot of people appreciate it in films, TV and advertisements.